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Chamber CEO Mark Futter claimed the group was not resonsible for a fiercely disparaging tweet about Labour Party leader Jacinda Ardern deriding her as inexperienced and with "no policies".

"No person in their right mind would post such material, and no reasonable person would believe we did," Futter wrote.

"We have been the victim of a malicious trouble-maker who is known to us, but is not part of our organisation."

The business group is laying a complaint with police after the tweet was posted from what it says was a fake Twitter account.

The tweet, from an account posing as the chamber's, said Ardern would destroy primary producers.

Futter said the account, which has been running since April 2016, had nothing to do with the group but had been set up by someone with "an axe to grind".

"We've been breached," he said. "We've identified who's done it and how it's happened, so some of our settings were updated and changed overnight including the removal of a link to our chamber website.

"Unfortunately, it's a former service provider to the chamber, and obviously that relationship didn't end terribly well, so the individual's got a little bit of an axe to grind and is causing us a little bit of reputational damage along the way."

Futter said the group would apologise to Ardern shortly.

The tweet was linked to the official Chamber of Commerce website until soon after the news of the tweet broke.

The account is still up, however, and has been retweeting stories from news sites - including news about the controversy - this morning.

Hutt City councillor Campbell Barry this morning questioned why the Twitter account was linked to the Chamber's official website.

If the account the tweet came from is fake, is the website fake too, he asked.

"I don't know who is behind it. But what I do know is that the Twitter page is linked to their official website and it's been running for a good 18 months.

"So either it's someone who has gone rogue or maybe it's been hacked, but I would've thought that the Chamber would've done something sooner, given that this page has been tweeting some pretty derogatory stuff for quite a while now."

He has uploaded a short video showing himself navigating the website and clicking on the Twitter icon at the top, which then takes him to the account where the disparaging tweet is still visible this morning.

The fake tweet that has led to angry comments on Twitter the past two days. Image / Twitter